The thirteen stories in this collection shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America's newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Marra's complex debut intertwines the stories of a handful of characters at the end of the second war in bleak, apocalyptic Chechnya. Though the novel spans 11 years, the story traces five days in 2004 following the arrest of Dokka, a villager from the small Muslim village of Eldar.

These stories take readers into overlooked lives in the neighborhoods, hospitals, and nursing homes of San Francisco, offering a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in American today.

Greta Wells decides to undergo electric shock treatment after the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover. During the course of the treatment she finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. In one scenario her brother
is alive, but masking his true identity, in the other her lover is now a devoted husband. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price.

Clay Jannon, an unemployed web designer takes a job at a 24 hour book store where he stumbles upon a mystery about a secret society and the missing book store owner. Sloan balances a strong plot with philosophical questions about technology and books and the power both contain.

Building contractor Mel (short for Melanie), Turner and another contractor spend the night in a haunted house to be renovated as part of the bidding process. Not only do the ghosts distract but tragically, at the same time, someone kills the elderly owner in the garden.

In this offbeat, downplayed thriller from noir king Nisbet a homeless 62-year-old hit man occasionally takes on a $5,000 murder contract to finance another binge of bitterly cold martinis in his favorite San Francisco bar. Details of the contract drop and the kill never become as important as the interior monologue

This novel accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an American writer has masterfully rendered the mysterious world of North Korea with the soul and savvy of a native, from its orphanages and its fishing boats to the kitchens of its high-ranking commanders

Estranged from his wife and daughter, former undercover cop Mark Mallen has spent the last four years in a haze of heroin. And when his best friend from the academy, Eric Russ, is murdered, all the evidence points to Mallen as the prime suspect.

Neil Bassett is working on a project at Amiante Systems whose scientists are using Neill's father's voluminous diaries to create a personality for the first "intelligent" computer capable of passing the Turing Test (able to fool a human user 30 percent of the time into believing that it is human). Neill spends his days in "conversation" with his dead dad.